Lalu Prasad Yadav asks workers to strengthen party

Ranchi/Patna: RJD supremo Lalu Prasad on Friday asked his party workers to reach out to the people and strengthen the party, a day after he was sentenced to five years imprisonment in connection with fodder scam.

"We met our leader. He asked us to go to villages and establish contact with the people and strengthen the party," RJD’s Jharkhand unit spokesman Manoj Kumar said.

Asked how their leader was in jail, Kumar said, "Absolutely normal. He spoke normally.”

In Patna, at its first public meeting after the conviction of party supremo, the RJD swore loyalty to him. Prasad remained the focal point of speeches made by the RJD leaders who took a pledge to take up the issue of their leader's conviction and remind people he was a flag bearer of rights of the poor and downtrodden.

State unit chief Ramchandra Purve described Prasad as an ideology and not a mere person and said that his charisma would continue to guide the party in its endeavour for electoral success in the general elections next year and the assembly polls a year later.

Purve claimed that Prasad would come out unscathed after getting justice from the higher courts in which both the party and the incarcerated leader had full faith.

At the same time, he said, his party would fight against those who had conspired against Prasad. Party workers who attended the meeting painted their bodies with the message 'Main bhi Lalu...Tum Bhi Lalu..Pura Bihar Lalu'.